None of these were what had alarmed Violet enough to leave the safety of her home. She needed to get past the loud, shared ideas and the commonplace lone ones, because there was something else beneath.
It was doubtful Violet could explain the nature of the current in which ideas lived while confined to using physics someone native to this planet could understand. Annie would maybe come closest to grasping the concept, and only because Annie’s mind had been touched by an idea even more complicated (and strong-willed) than Violet.
Time and space itself sat within a granular matrix of interconnectivity. Matter and energy were all part of the same membrane, and if one knew how to do so, one could transit information from one end of that membrane to another.
Ideas shared a membrane as well.
Something was traveling locally below the surface of the quiet ideas in this membrane, or current, or matrix. It was like being on a boat and sensing a whale swimming in the deep water beneath the hull. Or, more frighteningly: a bird in flight recognizing the shadow of a larger bird above it.
“Hi, sorry for waiting, what can I get you?”
Violet jumped. Later she would be proud of herself for having such an automatic human reaction to surprise. She was hardly ever surprised by anything or anyone, so it was an exceptional event in its own right. Obviously, the thing she was trying to hunt down had her more unsettled than she fully perceived.
“Yes, hello, coffee and white toast please,” she said. “And maybe an egg. An egg? Yes, I’d like an egg. Two eggs.”
“All…right,” the waitress said. Violet didn’t know this one; she was perhaps one of their new high school seniors. Their work staff was always very local. “Great, how do you want those eggs?”
For the briefest of seconds, Violet didn’t know what the question meant. Unhatched, she nearly said.
“Scrambled?”
She said it as a question, because she didn’t know if this was a way to prepare eggs either. Her human body was currently blushing.
“Great! Some hash browns with that?”
“That would be good.”
“All right! Be right back.”
Violet waited until the girl returned with a cup of coffee before diving back into the pool of ideas again. Then she thought she shouldn’t go into that pool for a half an hour after eating, laughed at the joke to herself—it was exactly the kind of corny joke Annie would have appreciated—and then went back in.
Trying to pick up the anomaly was a little like attempting to isolate an audio signal in the middle of significant background noise. Or, like trying to debug a computer program’s subroutine. She decided she liked the second comparison better, only because whatever this low hum of a background idea was, she’d already decided it was malicious.
Then she found it. It snapped into focus suddenly—focus was the wrong word—and for a second she was utterly overwhelmed. She had to pull away.
“You’re Violet, right?”
Violet looked up, surprised, for a lot of different reasons. The speaker was Beth, and Beth was holding Vi’s breakfast order, which meant a little more time passed than she realized. This wasn’t an enormous surprise, because of what she was doing. It was easy to drift away from the physical a bit when swimming in the idea stream or… well, she couldn’t decide on an appropriate metaphor.
A much larger surprise was that Beth knew Violet’s name. That was more or less entirely impossible.
“Annie’s friend,” Beth elaborated, in case Violet didn’t know who she was herself. “You used to come in here with her all the time, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you.”
Beth put down the food.
“And you’re Beth,” Vi said. Maybe once everyone had gotten everyone else’s names right, this would be over.
Most people read Violet’s behavior as the tendencies of an introvert, which was pretty close to accurate, only because like a true introvert, Violet found long-term interaction with human beings simply exhausting. (As with so many other things, Annie tended to be the exception, although even then Vi could only take her in scheduled doses. She thought a lot of people actually felt that way about Annie.)
“Yes ma’am! Oh, hey, are you okay?”
Beth sat down.
“I’m okay, yes, thanks.”
“You just look really pale right now. When I came over it looked like… well never mind, how are you?”
In all likelihood, Violet had looked dead to Beth, because sometimes when Vi left the body of the young girl she forgot to tell it to keep breathing.
“Still okay,” Vi said.
“I mean, what are you up to? Annie’s off at college; I was sure you were too. She always said how smart you are.”
This was patently impossible.
“I’m taking time off right now. A year off, to work on… on the farm, you know. I guess I haven’t decided what I want to do next yet.”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
Violet was supposed to say something else now, but she wasn’t clear what it was supposed to be. She tried running through all the times she watched Annie do this, and then tried recalling dialogues in movies for additional points of reference, and after that a review of a couple of her favorite Socratic dialogues just in case that was what she was engaging in. Then she figured it out.
“And how about you?” she asked Beth.
“Mostly just helping out around here right now. Place really runs itself, but… and I’m still in ZA rehab. Once that’s over, I was thinking about community college. Depends. Maybe I’ll sell my story to Hollywood. That’s a pretty popular career path around here.”
Violet desperately wanted to come up with a series of questions that would lead to an explanation for how Beth Weld remembered Violet Jones, but she wasn’t nearly as good at teasing out information as her best friend tended to be. It was a little ironic, considering only one of them was an extraterrestrial thought-being.
“ZA rehab? What’s that?”
“Oh, hah, you haven’t heard that? Sorry, it’s some shorthand, bad joke, I don’t even know who started it. Zombies Anonymous. You know, for those of us who… well, you know.”
Violet did know. After a number of complaints and a whole lot of media attention, the government provided the town with a block grant to cover the cost of the physical (in some cases) and mental (in almost all cases) recovery of the local former zombies. Or rather, the ones who had survived.
That physical rehab was even necessary was something that had taken Violet by surprise, because the general health and well-being of the survivors was something she had a direct hand in. All of the ones who hadn’t already perished by the early morning should have awoken at least as healthy as they were the prior evening, if not healthier. But there were still complaints that ran the gamut from equilibrium issues to lingering pain in supposedly healthy limbs.
The institute founded to study and treat the effects considered most of this psychosomatic—Violet read all of their documentation, something they were certainly unaware of—and thought that was a reasonable conclusion. The mental issues the same institute was facing included people suddenly becoming panic-triggered by benign objects, so the idea that their bodies might also ‘remember’ wounds that were no longer there was a decent one.
Violet thought they might be right, but also wondered if she was as good at repairing damaged bodies as she thought she was. Before the night of The Incident, Violet had only tried it on dead things.
So, she was aware of the rehabilitation program. She had just never seen ‘ZA’ in any of the literature.
“Zombies Anonymous,” Violet repeated.
“Yeah, we like to kid. But we don’t get up at the podium, like, ‘hi, my name is Beth and I am a zombie.’ Nothing like that.”
“How is rehab going?”
“Really well, but I was lucky. I was already strapped down when it started.”
Violet happened to know that Beth Weld suffered a stroke and nearly died that night. She
wondered if Beth knew this.
“How about you? I know it’s not polite to ask, but were you…”
“My family and I were all awake when it began,” Violet said. This was a combined exaggeration and out-and-out lie on just about every conceivable level. “And we’re very isolated. We didn’t even know something had happened until the following day.”
“Wow, so lucky! Well, let me get out of your hair so you can eat.”
Beth patted Violet on the wrist affectionately as she stood, a familial gesture of affection that just added to the totality of how impossible this was.
“Next time, say hey when you come by, I’ll even have your regular ready for you.”
“My regular?”
“Get just about the same order every time, don’t you? I have a head for these things.”
Violet did get the same thing—egg preparation notwithstanding—not out of preference but because it meant one less thing she had to worry about deciding on.
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“Like I said. I have some pull around here.”
Beth winked, and walked away. As she did, Violet reached inside of Beth for her idea of Violet and made certain—in a way that would be considered if not violent, then a little brutish by her kind—that it wouldn’t stick.
Then she ate her meal. She wanted to do more research into that strange undercurrent in the local membrane but now she had much more pressing concerns, so all she did was eat, leave money on the table for the bill, and head for the door.
“Hey, see you around, Violet,” Beth said, before she could reach the exit. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t,” Violet said, attempting a smile and a wave that might have looked like a grimace and a salute. She wasn’t being careful about the details.
She got out of the diner and almost ran to the car.
Violet Jones was an immortal energy-being. She had experienced very nearly all there was to experience, either directly or vicariously. But something she had never been before—not really—was afraid.
So, this was something new. She didn’t like it.
Part II
April
6
True Stories
This is an unpopular opinion, I know, but don’t you think it’s time we talked about it? Ms. Collins has overstayed her welcome, the charm has worn off, and we’re left asking ourselves: why, again, did we let her keep that spaceship? What were we thinking?
For all we know, the cure for cancer is in orbit right now, and the only person in the way of that cure is a college freshman in Massachusetts who thinks it’s a toy…
Stanley Dunwit, WSJ editorial
The Internet had forty-two distinct websites fully dedicated to Annie Collins. Not all of those forty-two sites were complimentary, or perhaps more accurately not all were of the sort that Annie herself might call complimentary.
Seventeen were quite nice, in that they appeared to be run by and for people who had good things to say about Annie and wanted to be around other people who felt the same. Eighteen were actively negative, or ‘positive’ in the way that a man shouting compliments to a woman jogger from his car might be deemed positive by the guy in the car.
That left seven sites that were straight-up bonkers: individually unique aggregations of off-kilter conspiracy theories, threats of violence that triggered regular FBI investigations, and the kind of sexually explicit rumors that made the World Wide Web so very charming.
The oldest of these forty-two sites was an unapologetically Annie-positive website called CollinsWorthy, and Lindsey Drucker—who ran the site under the online pseudonym “Canny Ollins”—was possibly the luckiest person ever.
Lindsey was the same age as Annie Collins, and while she didn’t come from a small Massachusetts town, she did come from a small Vermont town at the state border, which was so close to being the same thing she sometimes lied about it and didn’t feel the slightest bit bad about that lie.
Lindsey spent three years obsessing over the Sorrow Falls spaceship, just like everyone else on the planet at the time, but unlike everyone else she was only a thirty-five-minute drive from it. (Lindsey couldn’t drive to it herself, but she had friends who could take her there, and did, until they got sick of doing so.)
On the night of The Incident, Lindsey got especially lucky. Her older brother Dick was a Vermont state trooper, and it happened that on the evening when Sorrow Falls went dark and zombies (!!!) walked the Earth, Dick and his fiancé at the time were having dinner with mom and dad Drucker, and Lindsey. Lindsey was next to Dick when the call came in: Something was happening in Sorrow Falls and everyone with a badge had to head that way and report back on what in the heck that something was.
So, Lindsey knew before a whole lot of people that something was up with the spaceship, but that wasn’t really why she was lucky. There was also the police-band radio her parents kept, as part of her mother’s obsession with keeping an eye (or in this case, ear) on her oldest child when he was on duty. Lindsey spent the entire night at that radio, trying to understand what was going on twenty miles to her southeast.
The radio picked up army frequencies just as easily as other frequencies—that, or the army was using the same channels as the police; Lindsey never really understood how it worked—so at sunrise, Lindsey became one of the first people to hear the name.
“We have Annie Collins,” someone said.
That was all, but it was enough.
Lindsey’s obsession with Sorrow Falls dovetailed nicely with a rapidly developing Internet savviness, so she had Annie’s name cross-referenced against several different lists of local residents. It wasn’t long at all before she found Annie—shockingly—in the high school rolls.
Ten minutes later, Lindsey registered ten iterations of Annie Collins’s name, and started CollinsWorthy.
This was what made her the first Annie Collins fan site. It was almost impossible to dispute, because Annie’s name wasn’t released publicly for another two days. The only site that had any beef was AnnieCollinsWasHere, which was founded two years earlier, except two years earlier it had been called the SorrowFallsObserver.
This was a huge part of why Lindsey called herself lucky. She had no reason to think Annie was going to end up being as big a deal as she was, back when all Lindsey knew was that the army cared enough to announce that they ‘had’ Annie. Lindsey did remember thinking it important because it was particularly odd, them going out of their way to take a sixteen-year-old into custody and to announce that fact. The implication was that they had orders to do it, and that was very interesting. At the same time, even to Lindsey, this explanation sounded like the sort of after-the-fact logic she applied at a later date to explain a decision that was otherwise inexplicable.
The fan site exploded once Annie’s name came out, partly due to rumors that ‘Canny Ollins’ was in fact the famous Annie Collins rather than the not-at-all-famous Lindsey Drucker. This still happened a few times a week, people writing to her as if she were Annie. (“I am not Annie Collins” was part of her email signature.)
If Lindsey weren’t pathologically shy, she probably could have taken better advantage of her online fame, but she generally preferred to be anonymous. Most people, with a little work, could connect her to CollinsWorthy, but she didn’t encourage the connection, either online as herself or face-to-face.
Anyway, the site was popular, it got enough traffic for her to collect sufficient advertising money to pay for her school books and a few extra pizzas a month, and that was cool.
But that still wasn’t the only reason she called herself lucky. No, what Lindsey Drucker defined as luck—if not, sometimes, more than luck, something like kismet or fate or the will of the gods—was committing to attend Wainwright College two months before Annie Collins did the exact same thing.
Lindsey’s newfound proximity to Annie ended up being the only way her website remained relevant, because as a whole, interest in Annie had been waning for some ti
me. Lindsey could see it happening graphically, expressed in page hits. She was friends with a number of the other sixteen decent fan sites, and three of them had already decided to stop putting up new material. One had no choice: It was a fan fiction site, and nobody was adding new fiction.
There was a part of Lindsey that was sort of glad to see the down-cycle in interest. She felt like she knew Annie super well, albeit only from a distance, and got the sense that Annie’s goal all along was to get people to leave her alone. Maybe that meant a site like CollinsWorthy would end up being irrelevant, but if that was what Annie wanted, Lindsey was okay with it.
Until then, she (or rather, Canny Ollins) had a responsibility, as something like a journalist, to continue to report on Annie.
This meant Lindsey had to get a handle on her own shyness, a task which was already on her list of requirements for a successful college experience. (It did not mean meeting Annie; just the idea of this terrified her.) Shyness wasn’t an issue for any other thing she did relating to CollinsWorthy, because none of that involved meeting someone face-to-face. In fact, hardly any of it included real reportage; a lot of the time she just aggregated news from other sources and provided additional commentary to go with the excerpts and links.
One of the things that made the site work so well was that Lindsey was the arbiter. She decided what was true enough to be included on the site versus what was unsupported rumor. She also tended to ignore most of the negative stories about Annie. When challenged on this point, she countered that CollinsWorthy never purported to be objective, and also it was her site, so she posted what she wanted, neener-neener. Privately, she thought the negative stories didn’t pass the ‘true’ test, but that was a more difficult argument, because surely every public figure had some bad things about them that were also true.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 8